Sometimes movies arrive in theaters to the sound of a sad trombone. They stink up the
joint for awhile, and then they slink away in shame. So the next time you're having an
off day at your job, just be glad the results don't get released to thousands of screens
worldwide.
2004's The Grudge was one of the more well-regarded films of the wave of American remakes of Japanese
horror films that we saw in that decade. Unfortunately, Hollywood studios are apparently thinking
that now is the time to start rebooting all those remakes. Or they did, until the 2020
edition of The Grudge crashed and burned hard enough to give them second thoughts about
revisiting this particular franchise. It had a promising pedigree, with Nicolas Pesce,
the filmmaker who broke out with 2016's The Eyes of My Mother writing and directing, and
a cast that included John Cho, Betty Gilpin, and horror legend Lin Shaye. What it didn't
have was an original plot, a consistent tone, or any real scares.
“I’m scared.”
“I’m scared too.”
Paul Whitington of The Independent was one of the many critics to bemoan the seeming
lack of effort put into the film, writing:
"This is shoddy stuff, full of J-horror cliches and supposed jump-scares you can see coming
a mile off…It's not particularly frightening, but it sure is depressing."
Virtually every critic acknowledged the solid awesomeness of the cast, but the fact that
The Grudge squandered their talent only gave reviewers another reason to trash the flick.
The sad fact is that when there are already two other, better versions of this movie out
there that still hold up as icons of their era, this remake isn't just bad on its own
merits, it's pointless, too.
Like a Boss was another film that utterly failed to capitalize on the considerable talent
of its cast. On paper, the roster of talent assembled for this mess is phenomenal, with
Salma Hayek, Billy Porter, Rose Byrne, and Tiffany Haddish, who seemingly cannot catch
a break when it comes to her cinematic outings.
"Don't hate me, hate Mel. It was her idea."
"What?"
Byrne and Haddish star as a pair of up and coming businesswomen whose friendship is put
to the test when their small cosmetics company is bought up by a corporation. It's a classic
comedy setup, and this 83-minute groaner made feeble stabs at both subversive laughs and
a "hashtag girl boss" female empowerment vibe, neither of which worked.
Vulture's Alison Wilmore put it best in her review, where she asked the same question
that everyone in the movie's meager audience was left wondering:
"How do you make a movie with [this cast], and have it be so devoid of joy?…It feels
like a film whose point is clumsily misunderstood by the very people who created it."
That's brutal, but accurate, and Wilmore wasn't alone. Peter Travers, the resident film critic
at Rolling Stone, rated the film at one out of five stars, and called it, quote,
"a comedy on life support…Sorry to report: the patient died."
Here's hoping Haddish, Byrne, and the rest of this talented cast get a better opportunity
to show off their considerable talent in the future.
After being the face of the most popular franchise in the world and getting the most heroic death
in recent memory at the climax of Avengers: Endgame, Robert Downey, Jr. was probably in
the rare position of being able to follow his 11-year tenure as Iron Man with pretty
much any project he wanted to. Apparently, what he wanted to do was star in Dolittle,
a retelling of a classic story that baffled critics and required Downey to sport one of
the most impenetrable accents in film history.
"It's a nightMAAAAARE."
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw took a particular dislike of Downey's garbled dialogue delivery,
writing:
"It really is horribly inert, and every time Downey opens his mouth to say something unintelligible,
the film dies a bit more."
“Enemy! Starboard aft! You and Elsie, ready the machine! We’re going to need speed,
send out the call!”
The film's oddly slapdash quality, troubled production and poor special effects were called
out by a lot of reviewers, but the fact is, this thing could have looked like Avatar and
still have been a disaster. More than one critic regarded Downey's performance as a
career worst, which is saying something when you consider that he's had 40 years of starring
roles leading up to it. That said, it appears that there was little that Downey could have
done to save a movie that was simply ill-conceived and poorly executed, but hey. Following up
a critically acclaimed movie that virtually everyone in the world saw with a universally
hated flop that nobody wanted is certainly a bold move.
When it was pitched, The Turning almost certainly seemed like a great idea. It's an adaptation
of the classic Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw directed by visionary filmmaker
Floria Sigismondi, whose recent work includes critically acclaimed prestige TV like The
Handmaid's Tale, Runaways, and American Gods, along with dozens of music videos. The cast
was stacked with stars Mackenzie Davis of Terminator: Dark Fate, breakout Stranger Things
star Finn Wolfhard, and Joely Richardson, fresh from a role in 2018's stylish spy thriller,
Red Sparrow. If that wasn't enough, it was produced by a guy you might've heard of called
Steven Spielberg.
“Can I help you?”
With all that talent, it was bound to be stylish, and most critics agreed that it was. They
also agreed that it was confusing, boring, and flat-out bad.
“Well I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Those obviously weren't the descriptors that the cast and crew and company were going for,
and they got worse. David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews called The Turning, quote,
"An absolutely abhorrent ghost story...an excessively deliberate drama that's almost
entirely devoid of dread and atmosphere...an almost uncommonly intolerable contemporary
horror flick."
There was plenty of praise for the actors, with more than one observer noting the project's
wasted potential, but quite a few others simply deemed the film a waste. It was especially
disappointing from a filmmaker with a stellar track record like Spielberg's. Jamie East
of The Sun might've put it best, and most brutally, writing,
"That the man who gave us Jaws and Poltergeist had even a smidgen of a hand in this relentlessly
dull barrage of cheap tricks is beyond me…Utterly ridiculous and not worth your time."
Recycling the premise of the classic, campy '70s television series Fantasy Island, in
which guests to a mysterious resort run by an enigmatic figure have their wildest dreams
come true, into a Blumhouse horror thriller was definitely a weird idea, but not the worst
one we've ever seen. Sure, the series ended before most of the movie's target audience
was even born and was never that well loved in reruns, but the setup could certainly lend
itself to scares, and casting Michael Peña in the Mr. Roarke role was nothing short of
inspired.
Unfortunately, the flick from writer-director Jeff Wadlow didn't just botch the adaptation.
“I don’t know how to tell you this boss, I don’t know what to say.”
As ReelViews' James Bernardelli put it, Fantasy Island 2020 made the campy, cheesy '70s TV
original, quote, "seem smart and fresh by comparison."
"Painfully unimaginative."
Fantasy Island was one of the most brutally reviewed movies of the year. Critics called
it convoluted, haphazard, and stupid, and those were the kinder reviews. The weak story
drew complaints that it was an absolute drag of a morality tale without the morality that
swapped out all the '70s cliches of the original for equally cliche modern horror tropes. A
revival of an old TV property that nobody was actually asking for can go very right
sometimes. Just check out the woefully underrated 2015 Man From U.N.C.L.E. for proof. This particular
fantasy, on the other hand, was more like a nightmare, and not in the fun, scary way
that it should've been.
2016's The Boy was an interesting horror effort, and one that wasn't really asking for a sequel
once all the scares were over. It was ostensibly the story of a killer doll who jealously guards
the house in which it lives, where parents whose young son tragically died years earlier
hire a nanny to take care of their not-so-inanimate boy. The flick's shocking final twist was
one of the more well-done in recent years, so, leave it to its sequel, Brahms: The Boy
II, to essentially undo it in the service of a far inferior movie.
In the words of Levar Burton, you don't have to take our word for it. Critic William Bibbiani
wrote in The Wrap that the movie swerved so hard from the good parts of the first film
that, quote, "it practically leaves skidmarks on the screen." Many critics weren't even
that kind, such as Benjamin Lee, who wrote in The Guardian that, quote,
"There's something willfully unscary about [The Boy II], as if director William Brent
Bell is trying to prove a point, shining a light on the sheer pointlessness of this kind
of by-the-numbers genre trash."
He also blasted the film for being so barren of originality that it pulled off the actually
pretty impressive feat of making an 86-minute horror film seem like an unbearably stale
snooze. Yeesh. On the bright side, with as bad as this movie was received, it's pretty
easy to guess that the creepy doll's greatest victim was the chances of getting any more
sequels.
A movie centered on Jesus Quintana from The Big Lebowski sure sounded like an interesting
idea. Star John Turturro obviously thought so, considering that he poured a lot of persistence
and a couple decades into getting the character into the spotlight with his own film, 2020's
The Jesus Rolls, which he wrote, directed, and starred in.
“F------ Quintana, that creep can roll, man.”
Unfortunately, the film leaned hard into the most cartoonish aspects of the character,
and away from the little things that made the Coen Brothers' Lebowski a classic, things
like nuanced humor, a solid plot, and dialogue that sounds like it could be spoken by actual
humans.
Brian Tellerico of RogerEbert.com channeled his site's namesake, calling the film uninteresting
and writing,
"It turns out that the main lesson here is that Jesus Quintana shouldn't be going places
outside of the bowling alley."
Other reviews were equally harsh, taking aim at the lazy comedy of the screenplay and the
lack of originality, and then went on to rack up ten frames worth of bowling puns. Flick
Feast critic Frank Ochieng went particularly hard on that front, leaving nothing to spare
as he framed up all the strikes against this cinematic turkey.
"The Jesus Rolls throws a gutterball down the farcical greasy lane in an unimaginative
sex buddy road flick where the thin-layered juvenile raunchiness is a strikeout of the
unwanted kind."
Doing a spinoff of one of the most beloved cult classics of all time after a full 22
years of anticipation was probably doomed from the start, but The Jesus Rolls would've
been bad no matter when it came out.
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